Welcome to the second episode of i cast pod, a podcast about Dungeons and Dragons! Every two weeks I’m going to be talking about various aspects of D&D, with plenty of tips and tricks to add flavour to your own roleplay sessions.

Here’s a rundown of the episode:

• 00:49 - What’s Involved? (In being a DM,.)
• 1:38 - What Makes A Good DM?
• 03:30 - What Makes A Bad DM?
• 4:58 - Responsibilities
• 6:14 - Session 0
• 8:40 - Rules You Should Know
• 10:47 - House Rules
• 11:42 - Homebrew Vs Pre-Built Campaign
• 12:43 - Preparation Time
• 13:14 - Maps & Minis Vs Theatre Of The Mind
• 15:16 - Describing The Scene
• 17:27 - Tools
• 21:02 - Music & Ambient Sounds
• 21:38 - NPC Tips
• 22:41 - Designing Encounters & Scenarios
• 23:23 - Monsters
• 24:10 - Handling Awkward Players
• 27:15 - It’s OK To Have To Look Things Up
• 28:10 - The DM Screen & DM Magic
• 29:53 - Reward Your Players
• 30:39 - DM Guidelines
• 31:41 : Wrap up
• Total runtime: 32:42

Links

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkVdb9Yr8fc05_VbAVfskCA- Matt Colville’s Youtube Channel

https://www.youtube.com/user/wilwheaton - Will Wheaton’s Youtube channel

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/facilitatorCollins Dictionary definition of ‘Facilitator’.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/ D&D Beyond - online DM tools.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/sac/sage-advice-compendium#RulesReferences - The Sage Advice Compendium - loads of good DM rules stuff.

http://roll20.net/ - Roll20 online TTRPG playing site

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/home/home.php- Fantasy Grounds

https://dm-helper.itch.io/dm-helper- DM Helper

https://www.dndbeyond.com/encounter-builder - D&D Beyond Encounter Builder

Mapping:

https://inkarnate.com/Inkarnate - Browser based map maker

https://www.wonderdraft.netWonderdraft - Desktop based map maker

https://www.profantasy.com/products/cc3.aspCampaign Cartographer - Windows based map maker 

https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/ Azgaar - another browser based map maker. Links with:

https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator Medieval Fantasy City Generator

Music/Sounds

https://syrinscape.com- Syrinscape

https://tabletopaudio.com - Tabletop Audio

http://www.bluefacegames.com/dmdj/- DMDJ

https://www.worldanvil.com- World Anvil, Worldbuilding software

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cherry-Halma-Plastic-Playing-Pieces/dp/B01DCXSH5Q/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Big+Cherry+40x+Halma+Pawns&qid=1582240707&sr=8-1 - Amazon.co.uk link to multicolour player token Pawns.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/ - RPG Horror stories on Reddit. Worth a browse to see what NOT to do.

Stat Block Generator

https://tetra-cube.com/dnd/dnd-statblock.html 5e Stat Block Generator - I used this to create a Statblock for my Picklezilla monster that I posted on Instagram. (@icastpod)

Episode TranscriptCold Open 

Welcome to I Cast Pod, a podcast about D&D. I’m Mike, your host, DM, and guide to all things dungeonesque and dragon-y. In this episode, I’m going to be talking about being a Dungeon Master - What’s involved; what rules you need to know; what makes a good or bad DM; managing player expectations; prebuilt campaigns vs homebrew; NPC tips, and lots more. So let's get started. 

What’s involved

So you’ve decided to be the DM for your group - Welcome to your second job! Just kidding, but being a DM does involve more work than being a player. Players just turn up with dice, character sheets and notebooks and they're good to go. As a DM, there's a lot of prep you have to do before you get to the session. You may have to draw out maps, write plot points, prepare dialogue and exposition, and work out things like traps and monsters that are a good challenge for your group, as well as XP and treasure. Your main job though, is actually managing your player’s expectations. The better you can do this, the smoother your game will run and the better time will be had by all. More on this later

What makes a good DM

Matt Colville, a longtime player and DM puts it best I think when he says: “You only have fun if your players have fun.”

Taking on the mantle of DM means an unspoken contract between you and your players, which boils down to this: You have agreed to provide them with entertainment. If you deliver a campaign that only involves searching a single room for rat droppings,sfx: rats which turn out not to be there, chances are you're doing your players a disservice.sfx: exasperated A good DM aims to provide their players with an interesting adventure that’s fun to play, because that's what we’re all doing: We're playing a game, for fun. If it's not fun, then your players have every right to stay home and do their taxes, wash the dishes, or find something else more fun to do. So when designing your campaign, or prepping a pre-made one, put your players first. Think about what would make them happy.

The lamest way I can think to put it, is that as the DM, you’re the Facilitator of Fun. Just for kicks, here’s the definition of “Facilitator”:

A facilitator is a person or organization that helps another to do or to achieve a particular thing.(SN: link to definition.)

Which I think is actually a good definition of a DM. You’re there to help and guide the players on their journey. In game, it might be to find and kill the BBEG, discover a long lost treasure, or save the world, but in the meta game it is always to have fun, first and foremost.

You should be hoping for your players to do well, and occasionally even enabling that to be the case, (more on that later,) but at the very minimum you should be celebrating their victories and commiserating their losses as if you were one of them, because really, you are. 

What makes a bad DM

By contrast, a bad DM puts their own good time before that of their players. They might throw monsters whose challenge rating far outstrips their party’s level, just to watch them squirm, or worse, to watch their characters die. sfx: die No one wants their character to die, for the most part, so killing them kills the fun for that player. 

Contrary to what you may have heard, the DM is not supposed to be an antagonistic force - just because you control monsters and evil-aligned NPC’s, doesn't mean you should play that alignment yourself. If anything, a DM should fall somewhere between True Neutral and Neutral Good on the alignment chart. You're technically supposed to be True Neutral, but if you're not rooting for the party even a little bit, I’d say you’re doing it wrong personally. 

Will Wheaton also has a credo, which is “Don’t be a dick”, meaning don’t cause trouble for the sake of it. Really, Will’s credo is almost a distillation of Matt’s, just put another way. Don’t make things unnecessarily hard for your players just because you get a power trip from doing it. If your goal as a DM is a TPK, (or Total Party Kill,) sfx: slaughter don’t be surprised when your group doesn’t come back.

Responsibilities

Ok, so we’ve touched on the responsibilities you have to your players, but what else do you need to manage as a DM?

If you’re running a pre-made campaign, you need to have read ahead to know the major plot points. You don’t necessarily have to read the whole thing cover to cover, although that wouldn’t hurt, but far enough ahead that you should know what should happen at each session.

If you’re home brewing a campaign, and I would suggest you don’t if it’s your first time, just to make things easier on yourself, but if you are, then you need to world build like crazy. More on this later

You’ll also need to know what NPC’s will crop up, a little about each one, and if you’re going to do voices, I suggest working out what each NPC will sound like ahead of time and noting down accents, as well as anything else pertinent to their speech. 

You’ll need to know the basic rules - things like speed over different types of terrain, the order of combat, when to ask for ability checks, how to set a difficulty class, or DC, and more. It also helps if you know how to roll a character, as your players will look to you for help when creating theirs.

Don’t worry though, lots of the rules are actually pretty easy.

Session 0

I recommend you have a session 0, as this can help get your campaign off to a great start. In a session 0, you have a Q&A session with your players, manage expectations, roll characters and if you have time, I’d also recommend doing a short, fairly easy combat encounter. 

The Q&A should involve you as the DM explaining what sort of campaign you’re going to run, including setting - is the campaign taking place in Faerun, Ebberon, Avernus, Ravnica, or across several of the planes of existence? 

It’s a great time to ask what your players expect from the campaign - do they want combat, RP or exploration heavy, or a balance? - and also what to expect from you as the DM.

The combat encounter can be as simple as a few monsters in a single room. sfx: Monster growlsYou can tie it into the main campaign, or have it as a standalone one shot. It allows the party to get used to things like the order of initiative, particularly if there are players in the party new to the game, and also lets them try out their skills, spells and abilities, as well as develop the beginnings of inter-party cooperation. 

Why make it an easy encounter though? Why not make it super challenging? Because the encounter is like dipping your toe in a pool. It sets the expectation for what’s coming. If you teach your party early on that they should expect their combat encounters to be gruelling slogs where victory is not assured, it sets the tone for the campaign as a whole. Not everyone, and especially not many new players, will be up for every encounter running the knife edge between life and death. If your entire party is comprised of Dark Souls fans, then fine - you know they’re gluttons for punishment. 

Remember though, that these are level 1 players. They have few abilities yet and probably not a lot of hit points. Most video game RPG’s, start you off in an area where your challenges are less, because building up your players with a few wins makes them want to play more. The psychology of this will have been studied by the companies that create the games, so it’s worth paying attention to. It’s better to start easy and then build up the challenge as you go.

Rules you should know

I mentioned certain rules you should have down, such as movement, combat and ability checks etc, so let’s go over them:

• Walking over difficult terrain halves movement speed, so a movement speed of 30ft becomes 15 ft.
• Combat order is: Roll for initiative, establish places of players and NPC’s, then start in initiative turn. Players can move up to their speed and perform an action - have a listen to the previous episode “What Is D&D?” for more info on actions.
• Ability checks - You should ask for an ability check whenever a player asks to try something that has a reasonable risk of failure with consequences. So if a player hands an NPC a coin, no ability check is needed, because a)It’s an easy task that most people should be able to accomplish, and b)There are no real consequences of failure - the player would just have to pick up the coin again. 
• If a player tries to scale a wall, an ability check should be asked for, (usually acrobatics or athletics,) because falling off the wall is a realistic risk, with failure having consequences such as loss of HP, up to character death, depending on the height of the wall and what’s around it or at the bottom.
• Difficulty class is pretty easy too: Generally it will go from 0-20 at earlier levels, and up to 30 or higher at higher levels, due to bonuses etc. On the 0-20 scale, an easy task would have a DC of 5; medium - 10; hard- 15; and extremely hard - 20. Obviously you can tailor this to your own style of play. I’ve used DC’s of 12, 17 and so on. Generally though, you think about how hard something would be to achieve - take into account as many relevant factors as you can, such as:
• Is the wall they’re climbing wet, making it slippery?
• Is the door they’re trying to open sealed by magic as well as a mechanical lock?
• And so on. Then assign a DC, ask them to roll and describe the result.

House rules

Do you have any particular house rules? For my group, we decided on a flanking rule, as honestly, I was surprised that 5e didn’t have one in place. We decided as a group that if an enemy is engaged with a player, (or NPC,) and the player attacks from directly behind, that player rolls with advantage. The monster may then decide to face the attacking player as part of their move, negating the Advantage, but transferring it to the original player or NPC unless it turned so it could see both, or moved away, risking two attacks of opportunity.

If you have any in-house rules, session 0 is the best place to bring them up, so that players are reminded when the situation comes up in-game, rather than having a new rule sprung upon them in the heat of the moment, which can often feel unfair if it changes their expectations of what happens in that moment.

Homebrew vs prebuilt campaign

If you’re DM’ing for the first time, I highly recommend going with a pre-built campaign. There will still be a ton of reading and encounter building for you to do, as well as lots of improvisation as your players do things you never expected, but it takes the heavy lifting of world building off you. This lessens your burden and also allows you to learn from some of the best campaign writers out there.

Of course you can always homebrew a story into an established setting such as Faerun or Ebberon, using the relevant source books to ground your story in and provide a framework to hang it on.

Otherwise, you need to establish a setting, decide whether magic is prevalent or rare, write out a government, pantheon of gods, establish societies, factions and many other things, many of which may never see the kind of coverage in-game that you feel the amount of work you put in calls for. That’s just the way it is.

Prep time

Prep time for sessions varies depending on various factors - have you read ahead to figure out the story arc for next session? Do you need to create/draw out maps? More on this in a moment Have you got all your encounters built, either on paper or D&D Beyond? Have you prepped a couple of other encounters, just in case your party speeds through your content way faster than you thought they would? Make sure to give yourself enough time between sessions to prep.

Maps & Minis vs Theatre of the Mind

Theatre of the mind is essentially the DM describing every scene like the narrator of a fantasy novel. While this might sound like less work than drawing out maps either on paper or using tools like Roll20, Inkarnate etc, TotM requires a skill set involving writing, narration, performance, and improvisation.

Maps and minis can be useful for the players to get a general lay of the land both on the macro and micro scale - I use the map that comes with the Essentials Kit of the sword coast on one side to give players a sense of where they are in the world, and the other side, which shows a map of the town of Phandelin, to navigate their immediate surroundings.

I also use a dry erase battle map to either copy out the map of where they will visit this session and cover areas with black card until they are explored, or if they are visiting a large area with many rooms, I then copy out the maps from the campaign guide room by room onto graph paper, and put down each room as they encounter it.

During combat encounters, I find maps and minis are much easier for establishing distances and things like line of sight, as you can just refer to the map. Doing combat encounters as purely theatre of the mind is more difficult for players to get a grasp on which enemies they can see, or are in range of.

You don’t even have to spend a lot on monster minis - I use simple multicoloured board game “person” tokens to mark enemies and they players used those as well, until they bought their own minis. I’ll put a link in the show notes to them.

Ultimately the choice is up to you, but I find a combination of the two works best for me and our group. You can also buy maps, or multi-use tiles or entire scenery, but even with those I feel theatre of the mind still definitely has a place in your game and those descriptions can bolster scenery and set scenes and moods.

Describing the scene.

“Suddenly from somewhere in the dense brush to your right side, a rustle catches your attention, immediately followed by a volley of arrows that whistles past your head, thudding solidly into the side of the wagon you’ve been walking beside. The horses pulling the wagons rear and whinny, stopping in their tracks. A quick glance confirms that the rest of your party is in similar straights… what do you do?”

This is a good example of a...